The Case of Kyon's Disappearance
by AllenP3989
Summary: A rather dark, Lovecraft-influenced take on Haruhi's world.
1. Chapter 1

I have described everything I know of the events leading up to the exceedingly strange disappearance of my old friend and classmate in detail to the police. Despite this, I feel compelled to write this account, although I have no logical reason for this compulsion. I suppose that, in the end, I am no more rational than he is, or was, assuming the worst has happened. But I have a horrible inkling, that whatever strange ideas he may have held contained more than a hint of truth to them. Perhaps that is why, like him, I have developed a terrible fear of the night, and the sight of the stars above fills me with a horror that is indescribable in human terms.

I fear that it is these things from the stars above, or from beyond the very borders of this universe, that may be responsible for Kyon's disappearance.

Of course, that wasn't his real name, for that the curious reader can go the police records concerning his odd vanishment. It was simply what everyone at our middle school called him, and thus how I have always known him, and how I shall refer to him forevermore. I knew, from the times we spoke, that his nickname annoyed him, through the pauses he made whenever he heard his it, but his real name, royal and imposing as it was, hardly suited him at all.

Kyon was always a strange individual, given to odd fancies and strange notions about the world and the place of ordinary humans like ourselves in it. It struck me as odd that a friendship should have grown between us, given our vast differences in personality. Perhaps it is due to the fact that we were both regarded as abnormal by our peers, Kyon for his odd obsessions, and myself for the disregard I have for some of society's norms. That I was of the opposite sex from Kyon led to rumors that there existed a relationship other than the purely Platonic between the two of us, and to the idea that Kyon liked "weird girls". I accepted the implications of this assessment on my personality willingly enough, while Kyon strenuously denied the implications.

As I said before, Kyon had some odd fancies about the world. "Sasaki," he would say, "have you ever wondered about the existence of anything other than the mundane?"

"Such as?" I replied.

"Well, anything strange, really. Aliens, time travelers, espers, even sliders. Beings from other planets, or people who can read and influence minds, or even people from other dimensions entirely."

"Yare yare," I replied, "Kyon, you know that such things can't exist in this world."

We of course argued at length about my assessment of what was possible or impossible. My arguments clearly had the stronger logic, but Kyon was remarkably obstinate. Still, I found the time we spent together enjoyable, and it was a little disappointing to me when we went to different high schools. Of course, Kyon's chronic disinterest in academics made it practically inevitable that we would end up in different high schools.

That said, I worried about Kyon. While he was able to reform his academic act to a sufficient extent to obtain a decent score on his high school entrance exams, I feared that without my influence, he would soon fall back into his old, disinterested ways. I felt obligated to check up on him, from time to time, via Kunikida, our classmate who also went to North High. Why Kunikida, a much more studious individual than Kyon, who probably performed far better on his entrance exams, would choose to attend an average school such as North High is a question that has puzzled me greatly, but it is fortunate given my concerns. I am uncertain why I never contacted Kyon directly. Some vague force seemed to prevent me from doing so, which was why I had to rely on Kunikida for my information.

The reports that I received from my former classmate left me with mixed feelings. As expected, Kyon's academic performance regressed somewhat from his later middle school days, but thankfully had not fallen to its most abysmal lows. However, his withdrawal from school life, his lack of interest in extracurricular activities, excited some comment from his classmates, and I wondered what oddities Kyon was engaged in after school. I feared that he might be immersing himself in fantasies of the supernatural, as he had in the past, perhaps even allowing his mind, formerly reasonable enough not to dwell too obsessively on the supposed existence of aliens, time travelers, espers, and sliders, to take a turn for the abnormal.

My fears were excited in late December, when Kunikida reported to me that Kyon had begun spouting delusions in class, accusing his class representative of attempting to murder him, and declaring that one Haruhi Suzumiya should be present at his school. He had also apparently assaulted one student, an upperclassman named Mikuru Asahina. However, Kunikida reported, a few days after this apparent madness began, it subsided, with Kyon attempting to lead a normal life. He even, uncharacteristically, joined the literature club shortly thereafter. This was strange to me at first, given that Kyon had never seemed the literary sort. Kunikida confided that he believed it was due to an infatuation with the literature club president and thereto sole member, a Miss Yuki Nagato, and commented also that he considered this strange given that Kyon "liked weirder girls". When Kunikida realized his audience and the implications of his statement, he was of course profusely apologetic, which I found amusing more than anything else. This development assuaged my worries caused by Kunikida's previous piece of information, and I hoped that perhaps Kyon's interests had taken a turn for the more normal.

For the next several months, I heard very little about Kyon from Kunikida. Evidently, he had applied himself more to his studies, and had even assisted the literature club in gaining several new members, alleviating the concerns of Miss Nagato that her club might be shut down due to a lack of interest. They had even published an organ of literary work to which Kyon contributed. I requested this sample of Kyon's work, but Kunikida never got around to delivering a copy to me. While I was curious to see what subject matter had interested Kyon enough to put a significant amount of effort into it, I did have my own academic life to attend to, and I was satisfied that his bizarre obsessions of the past had apparently fallen by the wayside.

It appeared that my formerly strange and oddly-minded friend had fit into a normal life. He had even, apparently, begun a relationship of the romantic variety with Miss Nagato. Although I regard "love" as merely an outgrowth of the evolutionary drive to reproduce, it's nonetheless a normal part of human nature, and so the normality of Kyon's activities was reassuring to me. Gradually, I pressed Kunikida less and less for information, and soon these reports fell off altogether.

So it came as a profound surprise to me when Kyon himself showed up at my house one clear night, rapping loudly on the door and yelling frantically to be let in. While I was at first fearful of who this visitor might be, upon recognizing my friend I was grateful that there was no one else her to witness his outburst, lest he be arrested and placed under observation for his outburst. Still, I hesitated slightly before opening the door for him. Only the earnestness in his voice, and the memory of our friendship led me to set aside my reasonable concerns about his reasons for coming to my home.


	2. Chapter 2

"Thank goodness you're here," said Kyon as I opened the door to him.

I noted that my old friend was, physically, largely unchanged from his middle school days, apart from being slightly taller, and looking slightly disheveled. I found with a start that, despite the sense of foreboding his sudden visit and strange greeting had inspired, I was glad to see him after all these months. It occurred to me, in fact, that it had been almost a year since we had last seen each other, and this fact made me unaccountably sad.

"What's wrong?" I asked directly, naturally perceiving that something must be amiss.

As he entered through the threshold, Kyon muttered, "What's wrong, what's wrong, oh, gods, where do I begin?"

The indirectness of his response bothered me. This was not at all like the person I knew from middle school. We had always been frank with each other, and not given to such cryptic answers. Guiding him to the living room, I saw him collapse almost immediately into an armless chair by the wall, and place his head in his hands, moaning softly:

"She's gone. They took her, and I couldn't do anything to protect her. But now they're coming again. They're coming for me. Is this some punishment placed on me by whatever deity might exist out there, for my foolish wishes? _What did I do to deserve this?_"

Kyon's words were most disturbing. Who had been taken? Who was after him? Had he, unbeknownst to anyone (or at least Kunikida) become involved with unsavory individuals? Was he in over his head? I tried to reassure him, as I placed my hands on his shoulders:

"Listen, tell me what happened, Kyon. Whatever this problem is, we can fix it, if we approach this methodically. But you have to tell me the facts, first, or there's nothing I can do to help you. You came here for my help, didn't you?" I asked.

"I-I don't know. I have no idea why I'm here. I've probably brought the danger here, just by my arrival. But you're," he paused, "for some reason I believed, that you were the only person I could trust with this knowledge. The only person who might be able to help, somehow."

"Kyon, I'll do whatever I can, but there's nothing I can do if you don't give me some idea of what's going on. Just start at the beginning, and proceed chronologically."

He seemed to calm down slightly, although he glanced furtively around, as if there were unseen eavesdroppers or watchers of our conversation.

"I, well I-Sasaki, you remember what I used to talk about in middle school, right? What I was obsessed with?"

"Aliens, time travelers, espers, and sliders, right?" I asked.

"Well, I haven't met the slider yet, unless I'm him." What was this? Kyon was talking nonsense again. I remembered what Kunikida had said, about Kyon's strange episode last December, and wondered silently if this was some sort of relapse. While I shuddered at the possibility, my mind could not help but proceed to the possibility that my friend from middle school, who had always been a little strange, was suffering from the early stages of schizophrenia, and that this was his second psychotic episode, the first one apparently having occurred the previous December.

The facts would seem to fit. Schizophrenia typically first manifests in adolescence. The more dramatic signs, such as a psychotic episode, often take months to occur, preceded by a withdrawal from interactions with others, such as what Kunikida had described for the majority of Kyon's first year of high school. As for his apparent normality after his strange episode in December? Well, like other illnesses, schizophrenia can go into a "remission" of sorts, periods where an afflicted individual is apparently normal. Some of what I was thinking must have been made apparent in my expression, as Kyon's next words indicated, while he lifted his head to look me directly in the eyes:

"Sasaki, you're looking at me like I'm crazy. And I guess I can't blame you for thinking that. Sometimes, I wonder if I really haven't gone crazy. In fact, I wish that were the case, because then the horrible truths revealed to me would simply be psychotic ramblings. But the hellish truth, Sasaki, is that I am every bit as sane as you are. What I saw-what that girl, Kuyo Suou, showed me, could not have been conceived by any human mind, even a warped one."

The strange thing was that, despite his apparent psychosis (as measured the incredible nature of these statements that he apparently took as fact), Kyon had none of the other distinguishing traits of a schizophrenic. His speech, while frantic, proceeded logically, rather than in the disjointed manner often found in the most far-gone cases. Then again, perhaps Kyon was "merely" a high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic. Still, his entire manner seemed wrong for someone suffering a psychotic episode. I decided that I should still hear him out. Maybe, somewhere in his words there could be deduced some truth which influenced the particular form of his delusions.

"Kyon, just tell me what happened."

"Of course," he replied, "It all started with Haruhi Suzumiya. That's when my life became a hell of abnormalities. I can't claim that I'm a totally innocent victim either. While I accepted, by the time I was done with middle school, that there weren't aliens, time travelers, espers, or any of the other oddities I had wished were real, I still wanted a world where they were. I desperately wanted that, more than anything. _I just wanted something to happen, something interesting_. Well, I got my wish, and lived to regret it."

"Are you saying that you've actually met these supernatural beings, Kyon?"

"Met them? Every day after school, from April to December, I hung out with them. An alien, a time traveler, and an esper. And, just as the cherry on top, I hung out with an eldritch god: Haruhi Suzumiya."

This was worse than I had thought. Kyon's delusions were apparently so deeply rooted that he believed that he had spent months in the company of nonexistent beings. I contemplated alerting the authorities. It was clear that in his current state, the safest place for Kyon was in a psych ward under observation. And yet some vague force, the same one that kept me from contacting him all these months, seemed to hold me to the spot. I urged him to continue.

"Haruhi Suzumiya shanghaied me into being the first member of the SOS Brigade. She said that we would be searching for aliens, time travelers, espers, and sliders. I had no idea why she was so obsessed with this. I never told her that this was my obsession in middle school. I thought it was just coincidence. And the more bizarre thing is that we found the alien, the esper, and the time traveler, as if fate had deliberately gathered these three together. Of course, Haruhi didn't know about any of this. She just thought these people were a quiet bookwork, a mysterious transfer student, and a female moeblob.

I found out about the alien first. Yuki Nagato. She told me that she was an alien, and I didn't believe her. I thought that she had simply read too much science fiction, and was constructing fantasies around it. I'm sure that when she first told me all this, I was looking at her the same way you're looking at me," said Kyon, gazing intensely at me in a way that made me uncomfortable.

I recognized the name of the "alien", though. She was the girl that Kyon was apparently smitten with, wasn't she? If Miss Nagato had somehow encouraged my unhappy friend's delusions, then we would have words in the future.

"But I believed everything she said when one of my classmates, who also was an alien, tried to kill me. Nagato saved me from her. I think that's when I began to realize that my wish for strange things had been granted, and that I had gotten more than I bargained for. I learned for the first time what real danger felt like."

"In turn, I soon learned that Mikuru Asahina and Itsuki Koizumi were a time traveler, and an esper, respectively." I recognized the name Mikuru Asahina as the one that Kyon had apparently assaulted during his first episode. Had he simply constructed delusions around his various classmates, making them characters in this drama played out in his mind?

"Strange things happened. Haruhi almost remade the world on one occasion. We met a giant cave cricket in another dimension. I got drafted into going back in time and helping Haruhi write her Tanabata message, then I spent the next three years frozen in time in Nagato's apartment. And over the summer, we got stuck in a time loop that repeated 15,000 times, though luckily for my sanity, I don't remember most of it, except for the last iteration and some vague feelings of déjà vu. And the worst part of all this was that, while Haruhi Suzumiya was the cause of all this, she could never be made aware of it. Everyone seemed to think that such a thing would make her destroy the world, or at least throw it into chaos. So I spent months in my own little pocket of hell, being dragged around by a girl with sociopathic tendencies and eldritch powers, and nearly getting killed by the madness she called up unconsciously."

As Kyon ascribed all of these apparent miseries to Haruhi Suzumiya, I became aware that the name was vaguely familiar to me, though I couldn't place where I had heard it. It was clear to me, though, that Kyon had apparently gone quietly insane, his madness unnoticed by any of the observers around him. This made me angry, somehow. If someone had intervened earlier, when they first noticed his strange behavior, would he be as far gone as he was now? But then again, was I not to blame too? After all, I knew about his unhealthy obsessions before anyone else, but did nothing, merely considering them an amusing eccentricity.

"In December, I was wishing I had never met Haruhi. And then, on December 18th, I finally got my wish. Not that I recognized it at the time. In fact, I was shocked when I first noticed Haruhi's absence from North High. And then when I found out about Asakura, the one who tried to kill me, coming back, I think I snapped a little. Miss Asahina didn't recognize me at all, Haruhi and Koizumi weren't even to be found at North High, and Nagato was also not an alien anymore, she was just a normal girl.

I actually went off and found Haruhi. She was going to Kouyouen Academy now, and so was Koizumi. She gathered everyone together in the literature clubroom, and then the computer turned on. It delivered a message to me from Nagato. She said that she had set up an escape program to help me change the world back. And the insane thing was, I almost did it. I almost chose to go back to Haruhi's world, my hell on earth. But when I told Nagato, the one who was human, that I was going to leave, she almost cried. And then I realized that it was an insane choice, to go back to Haruhi's world. So at the last moment, I deactivated the program. I chose what I thought was a normal world, over Haruhi's crazy world. Was that so wrong?

And for a few months, everything was fine. I joined the literature club. Everyone seemed to forgive my outburst on December 18th. Back in February, I even started dating Yuki. For once in my life, I was actually happy, and everything seemed right with the world.

But then, three days ago, everything went all wrong. Another girl from Kouyouen, who called herself Kuyo Suou, showed up, and said that Yuki somehow had Haruhi's powers, and that something called the Sky Canopy Dominion needed to take her to study those powers. I tried to stop her, really I did, but there was nothing I could do. Suou was a humanoid interface, I think, and she was able to make me unconscious. And when I came to, Yuki was gone, and the police thought I had something to do with it. Miss Asakura had called them, and said that she hadn't come back to her apartment since leaving with me the previous day. But they didn't have any evidence to hold me, so they let me go this afternoon.

But while I was in police custody, I was visited in my cell by _that girl_, Kuyo Suou, again. She said that the Sky Canopy Dominion had made a mistake, that they also needed me to come with them. I didn't know what they wanted me for, I don't have any powers. I begged Suou, like a coward, to leave me alone, to not take me to face her masters. And for some reason, she wasn't able to take me, like she took Yuki. But before she left, she showed me, through telepathy I guess, where Yuki had been taken, the nature of the being that had taken her. It's not something for human minds to comprehend. If I were religious, I might consider it a mystical experience, but as it is, it can only fill me with indescribable horror. If I were to truly comprehend what I saw, I might go insane. I thought that what happened should have shown up on the video footage of my cell, but the cops said that they hadn't seen anything, that I had just gone to sleep and woken up the next morning. They told me, when they let me go, to get some help, that maybe I was suffering from post-traumatic stress. But I know what happened, dammit! Please, Sasaki, help me make sense of this! I don't know what's going on. I'M ONLY A NORMAL HUMAN! I'M NOT MEANT TO DEAL WITH THIS!"

After he spoke these last words, Kyon collapsed onto the floor, curling into a fetal position and whimpering pitiably. Needless to say, any doubts I had that he was suffering a psychotic episode were gone. I called an emergency line, and a van came twenty minutes later. Strangely enough, Kyon didn't seem to resent my action. He went willingly enough with them, muttering, "Maybe they won't take me, after all. They don't need me for anything. And maybe in there I can forget what I saw." It was only when he stepped outside, and looked at the stars above, that this new composure broke, and he shrieked, pulling away from the orderlies. They were about to chase him down, until he ran straight towards the van, begging to be let in, to be sheltered from the hideous void above him.

At the psychiatric ward, the doctors were frankly baffled. They said that, his delusions aside, Kyon seemed otherwise normal. They noted that he even seemed to have above-normal intelligence, as indicated by his wide-ranging knowledge of a variety of arcane subjects. Nonetheless, they noted that in his current state, he was not fit for society, especially given his acute agoraphobia. They said that he hated open spaces and large crowds, and actually preferred his windowless room to the rest of the hospital. They also said that he had a mortal terror of the night sky, and that in his unguarded moments he would talk about beings from the rim of space, and the horrors they would come to inflict on humanity.

No progress was made on the case of the mysteriously vanished Yuki Nagato. While her connection to Kyon seemed a clear sign that he had something to do with her disappearance, the lack of any solid evidence, and Kyon's persistent claim that he remembered nothing other than the approach of a strange girl in a Kouyouen uniform, made it impossible to move forward with any prosecution. Even if they had, the suspect was clearly not competent for the proceedings, and was already in involuntary confinement, although he was, by all accounts, a relatively cooperative patient.

So it came as a surprise when, a month after his initial confinement, Kyon's voice was heard, screaming in terror, from his room. When orderlies came to check on him, assuming that he was suffering a new psychotic episode, he was nowhere to be found, apparently having vanished into thin air.

To this day, six months after his exceedingly strange visit to my house, nothing can be found to indicate the reason for Kyon's disappearance. The video footage of his room is useless, as the footage for the time during which the orderlies reported hearing his screams is obscured by static. Some have suggested some sort of elaborate orchestrated escape, and even that Kyon's madness was part of an elaborate plot to avoid prosecution for his part in Yuki Nagato's disappearance while planning his escape. But no one has any idea how such a plot could have been carried out, or what accomplices may have assisted him.

The strangeness of the circumstances surrounding my friend's disappearance, and the earnestness of his account, have broken through the wall of logic, and caused me to suffer from the most irrational fears. Kyon spoke regretfully of bringing "the danger" upon me by my connection to him. After hearing his story, I was inclined to dismiss this as simply a part of his delusions. But his disappearance has cast all of this in a new light.

If we glimpse the vast gulfs of incomprehensible mystery in the universe, what would that do to our minds, to our carefully constructed logic and reason? What things, beyond human understanding, exist beyond the earth, beyond space and time itself?

I am afraid to leave my house at night. Not due to any _human _assailant, but for the nameless horrors that might lurk in the darkness above. The stars, a source of wonder for many people, have become nothing but a source of growing terror for me, as the months have passed. I fear for the fate of Kyon, and for the unfortunate girl who may or may not have once been something else entirely, but increasingly I fear for my own fate as well.

Perhaps we are not meant to solve the mysteries and questions of this world, and it is only our ignorance of those things, which we should not see or understand, which allows us to maintain this fragile thing we call sanity. And to truly comprehend is to be truly and completely doomed.

**Author's Note:** N**ot my best work. A darker, somewhat Lovecraftian take on the Haruhiverse seemed like a cool idea when I started, but my inspiration dried up pretty quickly, so I decided to end it here (because I can't stand to leave things unfinished). Also, I hate making the characters too OOC, and I found it difficult not to do it in this story. Still, it was a fun idea, and maybe I'll return to it in the future.**


End file.
